


and keep on walkin', come what will

by Incasa



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Girl Saves Boy, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25248868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Incasa/pseuds/Incasa
Summary: How would it look if it was Orpheus who Hades called a songbird, and seduced onto the train?Eurydice follows, of course, but she has her own way to reach the gates and escape safely with her beloved.Alternately, she can have little a popular rebellion, as a treat :P
Relationships: Eurydice/Orpheus (Hadestown)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45





	and keep on walkin', come what will

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_fanfic_in_a_hedge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_fanfic_in_a_hedge/gifts).



> My good friend who is known as a_fanfic_in_a_hedge around here thought that Hadestown might be more fun if Eurydice was saving Orpheus, rather than the other way around. That was sometime late last year? Then we all ended up stuck at home, and THEN the ideas I'd had for this fic got extremely topical. Hope I did the concept justice!

A ticket is many things. A refusal of home. A change in character. An escape from hunger.

A rattlesnake.

When the king gave him a ticket, it was a promise. Success, if he worked for it. An adoring audience who would understand as he spoke for them. A steady hand to his back, not a songbird, flying away when the hunger came.

A patron.

A chance to change the world.

A chance to make the king see his folly.

When she fell, it was in spite of herself.

He fell in certainty of himself.

What if it’s Orpheus who Hades takes as his?

*****

“Orpheus?”

“You came back.”

Eurydice stands among the bare tables at Hermes’, deserted with the storm raging outside. Her black hair hangs limp, weighted down by ice caught in the locks. Under her threadbare coat, she has a handful of crushed dandelions. A squirrel’s stash of nuts. A poppy, sheeted with ice but still beautiful.

Enough for a meal for one, that she would stretch to two with the poppy in a vase beside one of their guttering, smoky candles, all the comfort she could bring him as he tried to bring the world back in tune.

Behind her, the old man, leaning on the wall beside the door, which he has just closed with a look. Hermes’ suit is immaculate. In one hand, he holds a lyre, its strings snapped. In the other, a dead rattlesnake. A mockery of Apollo, this cold, stormy night, as far from the sun god as it is possible to be.

Eurydice turns and smiles. “I know how to take out the poison gland,” she says to the God of Lost Souls. “That can feed us for a few days.”

“Always thinking about your next meal.” Hermes’ expression does not change. To Eurydice, he has always seemed to hate her, with his set expressions and cryptic warnings. _Is he always like this?_ she had asked Orpheus. He had shrugged.

With the thought of Orpheus, Eurydice’s mind turns to him, the man who she will make her husband. Every day, he sits by Hermes’ hearth, remembering the heat that resided there in summer and working on his song. Hermes’ is always filled with his voice, brimming with indescribable songs.

Hermes’ is silent.

The lyre is broken.

“Where is Orpheus?” There is more panic in Eurydice’s voice than she thought there would be. He might have gone to find firewood. He might have gone to check on one of the workers who came to Hermes’ in the summer.

If he had only gone so far, his song would still echo here. His lyre would not be shattered.

Hermes’ is silent.

The voice she loves is gone.

Hermes heaves a sigh, his stick-thin frame filling momentarily with air he does not need. He holds out the rattlesnake. “He took the train.”

The distant sound of the train’s mournful horn fills the space between Hermes' smoke-darkened rafters.

Eurydice sits down.

The sound of the train grows, crushing the girl into herself, until it is everything that she has ever been or ever will be. She had vowed never to have connections, to leave when the wind changed.

She will never be whole again.

The train’s horn grows distant, ends, and the echoes die away in the rattling windowpanes.

Hermes watches Eurydice a moment longer. He sighs again, and drops the snake on the table next to her. “For your meal,” he spits.

“How do you get to Hadestown?”

Hermes stops in the door to the kitchen, limned in the light he seems to carry from room to room. He is the God of Travellers, who guides them beyond the threshold of death. He must answer this question. “You got a ticket?”

Eurydice has a knife tied around her left shin. She has a railroad spike in her bundled possessions in the bedroom. She has a poppy encased in ice, a dedication to Thanatos, called Ephebe, who brings the sleep that some call death.

Eurydice knows her tickets, in case the hunger becomes too much.

She does not need her tickets.

“There are other ways in. The stories you tell, of your cunning and Heracles’ might. How do you get to Hadestown?” Eurydice steels her voice as best as she can.

Hermes’ shoulders slump. “There is another way,” he says.

“Yes?”

“I ain’t supposed to say…”

*****

She is a young girl. You would never say she is naïve.

Before she leaves, Eurydice guts the rattlesnake and freezes the meat. She takes a meal with Hermes. She gives the offerings—a drop of wine, a piece of offal, a poppy, still frozen in ice—and asks the questions. She knows the barriers, the rules, where to shelter, to eat, to ask for help. She takes what she can of Orpheus’s—a scarf little more than a rope, an extra jacket, the sleeves and hem too long, the last of a box of matches—and dons it, to hold the chill at bay a little longer. She says goodbye. She ignores the voices, the ones that say she is a fool, that this is fate.

At last, Eurydice opens the door to Hermes’ and steps into the biting wind.

Ice collects in every crease of her jackets. The wind snatches at her, desperate for what she has: food enough for two days, four matches, a knife, a prayer. But she has learned how to hide things from the wind, and her treasures stay against her skin, beneath the jackets and the scarves, the hats and boots. Eurydice trudges through snow like blades of glass to the frozen train tracks, turns to where the train went, bearing summer and death away both, and starts her long walk.

*****

Persephone finds the girl first.

For the first time in a century, she is shaken from a haze of drink by a throb of power that runs across Hadestown. She looks around, not sure where she has been or where she is going.

She lounges in a palanquin festooned with plastic imitation flowers. Workers press to the walls of the narrow street she is carried down. Like her, they have raised their heads at the intrusion of power. Unlike her, the recognition in their eyes fades, and they look back down. The bearers continue down the street, only faltering a step in their perfect, exhausted unity.

By Persephone’s idle hand sits a bottle, searing her nose with its potent spirits.

Her husband is so good to her.

Raising her hand, Persephone raps on the front wall of the palanquin. “To the storage lot,” she commands the bearers. Without question or complaint, only the bone-deep weariness of the souls of Hadestown, they change direction.

Persephone, Goddess of Flowers and Spring, has been summoned by a wilted red carnation, planted in dirt packed down by millennia of tramping workers near the wall, and she will be damned if she does not answer.

Instead of in the storage lot, Persephone finds the girl tucked in the foundations of the tenement next door. She reminds Persephone of a cat who lived in her garden, back at the beginning of things. Torn and scratched, rail-thin, almost unable to see with fear, going through the motions of life. Then, Persephone set out food and, after weeks, the cat sat in her lap and came at her call. Today, Persephone has a bottle of spirits and a plastic daisy chain.

“It’s been a long time since one of the living snuck past the walls, sister,” Persephone says.

“Where’s Orpheus?”

Ah. Hades’ toy. Where had he gone when her husband finished playing with him?

“Come by the bar, sister. I’ll tell you then.”

*****

Eurydice looks up to see Persephone standing behind the bar, a bottle of Asphodian liquor held in her hands.

She has been sitting at the bar for hours, waiting for the goddess to arrive. The few workers who had the energy to speak to her had directed her to Persephone’s bar. It’s a little place, thick with smoke, the air soupy with the burnt-out exhaustion of the workers. All the wobbly plastic tables and vinyl chairs waver in the pervasive haze, and the only thing solid is the counter Persephone serves from, made of dark faux wood and with stainless steel spouts announcing the drinks on tap.

In front of Eurydice, a few coins she picked off of Charon, the ferryman, and a golden bangle fished from the banks of Lethe using a long hooked pole. She ran out of food three days ago, and she is reeling with the familiar hunger.

“Where’s Orpheus?” she asks the goddess, her voice once more hoarse with disuse.

The goddess who once threshed the grain holds up one admonishing finger. “He’ll come by soon, sister,” she tells the girl. “I’ve asked him to give us a concert.”

“He’s still performing.” Eurydice feels a glimmer of hope. Perhaps she is not too late, and Orpheus hasn’t become another of the millions of blank souls in this place, the dead and the worse than dead.

Persephone’s smile is cryptic as only a god’s can be. “A drink while you wait? Pomegranate slice?”

Eurydice’s smile vanishes. She knows the story of Persephone’s own capture and imprisonment. “No, thank you,” she replies, shoving away her thirst and hunger a little longer.

The goddess’s perfect teeth show in her smile. She may be adrift in a sea of exotic chemicals, but Persephone is still a goddess, a cajoler and a trickster at heart. In this game, though, Eurydice knows the goddess prefers to be beaten.

Other patrons drift by, giving wisps of phantom worship in return for the flower goddess’s favours. Eurydice watches Persephone drink each spirit an ironic health, ignoring the listlessness of their devotion through enthusiasm and indulgence. Though she is a goddess, and can never know hunger, Persephone feels numbness and deprivation. Eurydice wonders who the spirits worship: Aristi Chthonia, kindest of the death gods, or Kore Soteira, the saviour maiden of spring?

At last, just as the room begins to swim before Eurydice’s eyes, the door opens. It is not a sound that Eurydice hears then, but the echoing familiarity, which fills in the gap where her heart once rested in her chest. She turns to see him.

Orpheus looks just the same. His clothes are fine now, subtly patterned silk and a hat that shades his eyes. He carries a new lyre, the shine of which cuts through the smoke of the little room. But his height, his self-conscious carriage, even the hold he has on his lyre, are all the same. Eurydice watches as his head darts back and forth, waiting for him to see her. Instead, he moves to one of the empty stools by the door. He sits, begins to tune his lyre.

He has not looked up.

Eurydice turns to ask the goddess why this is, but Persephone is at the other end of the bar, engrossed in a worshipper.

She turns back just in time as Orpheus begins to pluck at the strings and looks up. His eyes catch her. Their blue pierces straight through her, ignorant of her presence. He does not see.

The lyre is beautiful, each note liquid and full, but its sound lacks the virtue Orpheus is supposed to imbue it with. When he begins to sing, the words are the same ones he used to sing at Hermes’ up above, pieces of the song he said would change the world. They do not. His voice is just his voice, falling on the thick silence of the bar.

Before, his voice echoed and doubled in complex harmony and counterpoint, weaving light and warmth from darkness and cold. Eurydice supposes it is so bright and hot here in Hadestown she wouldn’t know if he could still do that. If you heard his voice, he made you feel unstoppable. His voice had, at last, brought her to love him.

No one but Eurydice turns to listen to Orpheus now. His singing is as tuneful as it ever was, but it is just a voice. He does not call forth righteousness and valour. Eurydice thinks he looks sad, perhaps disappointed, but he might just be as bone-weary as the population of Hadestown. Just as dead.

The door of the bar opens again.

The man who steps in carries in his tread the presence that lies behind Hermes’ eyes, and darts at the edge of Persephone’s self-deprecating laugh. His presence hangs in the air around him, dampening the already subdued atmosphere in the bar. Orpheus flinches slightly, and his tone wavers. The man is tall and broad, dressed in a fine suit. Though his face is calm, his eyes reflect the light of every jewel under the earth.

Hades, God of Hadestown, crosses the bar and comes to stop in front of Eurydice.

“A visitor?” he asks, his voice a soft basso profundo. “I should have been there to welcome you.”

Eurydice ignores the gentle threat behind the death king’s words. “Your Majesty,” she murmurs, “I had the honour of meeting your guard.”

“Cerberus?” Hades produces a tight-lipped smile. “Has the Nemean Lion returned? I can’t imagine another reason he would have vanished.”

Eurydice reaches into her sleeve and slips out the olive branch she received earlier. “Lady Pallas sends her regards.”

If he is surprised that this mortal girl has bargained with Athena, Hades doesn’t show it. Eurydice wonders absently at how everything around them has faded into the smoky air of the bar.

“And why has a living woman come to Hadestown?” Hades asks. He is leaning in to her, his face intent.

“Love.”

One eyebrow lifts. “You wish to join your beloved?” Hades’ head tilts in Orpheus’s direction. He is still singing, somewhere, in the distance.

“What happened to him?”

Hades rumbles a ghost of a laugh. “I made him a deal. My patronage for his devotion. He believed he could enter my house with honour and dismantle the foundations, but I knew better. He is just one man, and one man singing will not change the world.”

Better than Hades could believe, Eurydice can imagine that. The first day, Orpheus singing on the steps of the palace, his magic filling the agora, the people barely pausing in their labour, for there are more important things to a weary, lesser than human worker than a song. The second day. The third day. Every day, not a glance to his singing. At last, long before Eurydice came to the gate of Hadestown, Orpheus can no longer muster his old faith in his song. He becomes simply one more soul, a player of a beautiful, powerless song.

“Will you return him to me?”

“Why should I?” asks possessive Hades. Is he covetous of souls, Eurydice wonders, or is it simply nature that compels his single-minded collection in Asphodel?

“I would like to make a wager.” Eurydice lifts her coins and the bangle from the bar counter and lays them on a table that has appeared between her and Hades. “I bet my full material wealth I can win a game, you bet a single soul.”

Hades narrows his eyes. Eurydice has called on him in one of his most fundamental forms. He is called Plouton, the one of wealth, as much as he is called Agesander, collector of men. But this bargain, Eurydice knows, is not enough for him.

“I bet my service. One century of a living human’s work on your wall.”

Hades’ slitted eyes snap to the table surface as a sheet of paper appears from thin air, writing out the contract almost before Eurydice can finish naming it.

“Wife. Bring the board.”

*****

The only light is a sourceless, harsh pillar that shines on the table before them. The only sound is the distant pluck of the lyre and Orpheus’s indistinct melody. Eurydice smells acrid smoke. Tobacco, exhaust, entrails, and yet more exotic fumes. The table between her and the god is rough concrete, hot as if it was dipped in molten steel.

From the darkness around them steps the wife of death. She no longer smiles. She places the game board on the table with more fluidity of movement than Eurydice has ever seen in her, and steps back to sit beside Hades in her chair. If Eurydice had any hope of calling on Kore, the girl-goddess, to help her, she will no longer answer. Hades has called on Despoina, the mistress of the mysteries of the underworld, to oversee his game.

The board is a rough wooden tablet, marked with charcoal to create a pattern of black squares. The white and black checkers, smooth river stones, sit perpendicular to the two players.

With a twist of her wrist, Persephone holds out a rough set of knucklebones to her husband. He takes them and turns to Eurydice.

“We throw for the first move. Highest wins.” He holds out the bones, drops them into Eurydice’s small hand.

Eurydice has bet on knucklebones many times, to her detriment. Hermes, God of Gamblers, has never been by her side before. He should be now, as his ward plays a morose song somewhere in the smoky nothing around them. Eurydice raises the bones, carefully checks the sides of all four are balanced, and holds them to her lips. With all her might, she begs Hermes’ attention, even calls for Dionysus to bless this throw. She must move first. She throws the bones.

Four dogs. The lowest throw.

Hades’ smile is slow, as oily as the smog over his city. “Cerberus comes to his master’s call,” he says to her, sweeping the dice into his hand.

His throw is not Euripides, perfect, but he cannot throw another four dogs.

At Persephone’s nod, the board rotates, scraping on the concrete below. Hades is white, Eurydice is black. He takes the first move. This game belongs to the House.

Hermes and Dionysus have turned away from Eurydice, and they do not turn back.

*****

Since her earliest childhood, Eurydice has been moved by forces beyond her control. She has named them, remembered them, and known she could not fight back. The songbird does not fly into the teeth of the storm.

Demeter, raging at her daughter’s winter absence as people die around her.

The Fates, spinning the life-thread to the length that suits them and no other.

Aphrodite, her kiss soft in Eurydice’s youth, breathing love for a foolish, idealistic man into her soul.

When she collapses upon her sleeping mat, her first day of work on Hades’ wall finished, she wonders at the great goddesses. Can they know hunger? Do they feel the bone-deep tiredness of forced labour? Do their souls shred and tear with each absent gaze that lands on their skin? Does Persephone starve in Hadestown as her people do? Her rage is legendary, to be sure, but does it run true?

Can any god help these souls, who have nothing to offer them?

No god plays a fair game, Eurydice knows. That fact is as incontrovertible as the fact that no one man, no matter how beautiful his song, will change the world. The only way to play a game with a god is to make them believe that they have won.

Since her childhood, Eurydice has played dice with the gods. They have thought her a songbird. It is time to shed that skin for a viper.

*****

One hundred years is a long time, even for a god.

Eurydice is so careful that not even Hades, god of the slowly moving earth, feels her seismic shift.

It begins with stories. As she rests, trapped in hot, dark rooms with a hundred souls, Eurydice trades. She was a wanderer, up above, and she tells the grateful dead of towns, children, lives that have gone on or ended without them. She does not lie, and she does not grow numb. She is not Persephone, who can only offer the solace men know to ask for. She is not Lethe, who offers only oblivion. Some nights, Eurydice’s room is wracked with the sobs of the dead, who finally remember, and those of one living woman, who will not forget.

In return, Eurydice asks to meet with other souls, to share more stories. She asks that her companions remember her name and listen for it as they work. She asks that they do not forget once more.

Thus, the first ten years.

Orpheus plays in Hades’ palace, a prize kept on the shelf so the loser will always remember how she failed. On certain days, Eurydice finds herself serving a royal luncheon, her head bowed with exhaustion. On those days, she hears the strum of his lyre and the perfection of his voice. When she does, Eurydice lets herself break once more, knowing that Hades’ eye is on her, amused at her submission. As she has did a dozen times in her life, even before coming down below, she will reforge herself in the night, stronger for the shattering.

The dead of Hadestown, who have shared in Eurydice’s sorrow, her rage, her stories, begin to see again. It begins with a head, raised for a single instant as one man lays bricks on the impossible top of the wall. They come to Eurydice in the night, sending questions through webs of people so she can return the answers. Who are our enemies, that we need a wall so high?

Who speaks of enemies, that must be kept out with such a wall?

Thus, the next twenty years.

New souls come to Hadestown, new dead born since Eurydice walked the nine day road to Hell. From the first, they hear not of eternal war, or an outside enemy, but of a living woman who will hear them, who will tell them who they were and who they can still become.

It begins with a brick, thrown from the top of the wall to land with a shower of dust beside a lot full of vibrant carnations. A woman, only recently dead, who will no longer be part of this abomination.

Cerberus descends upon her with a spiteful howl, and a thousand souls are obliterated as they flee.

Eurydice hears of the people like this woman, who risk the oblivion beyond death rather than work on the wall. From the confines of her den, Eurydice arranges an escape, a bargain with Persephone to use the crack in the wall and slip a group of souls out to freedom. She is Aristi Chthonia, kindest death god, who will give what her subjects know to ask for. Souls vanish, and Hades cannot notice.

Sometimes, from the plaza before the palace, Orpheus can be heard playing for the king’s pleasure. Sometimes, exhausted souls find it within themselves to raise their eyes to seek the song’s source.

Thus, another thirty years.

If you are quiet enough, you can hear the third God of Hadestown. Far from Hades and his paranoid, discontented rumbling, apart from Persephone’s numbed lament, there is a voice. She comes late at night, and only if you ask in the correct way. She is tired, her hands worn and bleeding from the rough bricks she lays on the wall. If you need to remember, if you need an arm to hold you up as you work, if you need someone to lie beside you in silence and know that you exist, you need only call through her web and wait for her to come.

Eurydice does not always come in the same form. She has good friends now, other lost souls who share her rage against Hades and his misrule. It is said in Hadestown that, whenever you feel your load lighten, it is Eurydice’s hand holding you up.

Was this how the gods were made? There are those who would continue the work if Eurydice should leave. She merely began to help people, and others followed. On nights when she is overwhelmed, her mortal form beginning to buckle under the strain, that is when others hold her up. The exhaustion of Hadestown still exists, but it no longer reduces the employed to husks. Instead, Hades has found his tool of subjugation transformed into fuel for a fire that he is unable to put out. He is no Hephaestus, to forge another tool before the first breaks.

On a night in her ninety-eighth year of servitude, one of Eurydice’s bed-neighbours rolls over with a question for her. It has arrived from a worker who sleeps on the far edge of town, a child who died before their time. “Why did you come here?”

“Why do they ask?” Eurydice replies.

Her neighbour pauses. Then xe answers, “You told all of us our stories and reminded us of up above. You must have a story that brought you here, but you never told it.”

“Have you heard Hades’ musician?”

The next time Orpheus plays in the court, work ceases in Hadestown. As when they listen for Eurydice, they strain to hear this musician she has worked so hard to be near.

*****

On the last day that Eurydice owes her servitude to Hades, in accordance with her wager, Hadestown is quiet.

The next day, those able stand in the agora before the palace. Though Cerberus is let loose, a prayer goes up to Pallas Athena, and the three-headed dog is driven away before it can reach the mob.

If Eurydice were there, she might see the gods walking among the people of Hadestown. Hermes stands guard over those late risers who hurry through empty streets towards the safety of the throng. Poseidon, the earthquake god, rattles the earth in rhythm with the march of the souls. Hera, queen and wife, forever indomitable, leads a charge on any soldiers still loyal to the husband who has trapped his wife and his subjects.

If Eurydice were there, she might see Apollo, who brings the echoes of Orpheus’s oblivious music from the marble halls of the palace into the street. The people, who have hoarded the fragments of this song as Hades hoards their souls, begin to sing. Once more, a thousand voices in counterpoint and descant take up the song a naïve young man once said would change the world. A song cannot begin a revolution, but it can join one.

If she were there, Eurydice would see Hades step out of his palace, his disgusted queen on one arm. Looking much smaller than his stature would suggest, he asks the crowd where Eurydice is.

Instead, Eurydice feels only the presence of Hestia in the dormitory she has converted to an infirmary. She still aches from her work yesterday, her back not what it was a century ago, regardless that she has not aged a day. She learned up above how to bandage her hands so she could still use them after a day of work. She and her friends who cannot walk outside work to prepare the infirmary, in case things go wrong. The gods stand with her for now, but she knows: they do not starve. They stand with her because she has forced them, made the right prayers, fought the right battles.

She knows she is wanted before the child runs into the infirmary, calling her name. Perhaps Hermes, the messenger with his winged shoes, has found he enjoys her after all, and called out to her. She is ready, in her threadbare overalls, her bandaged hands, grease-stained face, and her stomach cramping from a century’s starvation. In one pocket of her overalls, she carries alcohol-soaked rags in case of injury. In the other, a small plastic bottle of water. In her heart, which she has rebuilt from a thousand tiny kindnesses, she carries all she needs to overthrow a king.

The crowd is quiet as Eurydice passes through them. They all know the story: a young girl with nothing but a few offerings, who played dice with death and only seemed to lose. She has won against the House in every way that matters, and she feels it in the heavy gaze of every one of the gods.

There are a hundred steps to the palace doors, polished out of iridescent black stone shining with the glare of overhead lights. At the base of them, Eurydice feels her legs suddenly about to give out under her, at long last exhausted.

She feels a hand on her shoulder and wonders deliriously if it is Hermes. Does this count as a journey? But, as she turns to look, it is her bed-neighbour. On her other side, one of the children who she told her story to. They help her up the first step, and each raised foot after that feels easier, until Eurydice feels as if she floats up the last ten dark steps to the palace doors.

Persephone smiles at the sight of her. The goddess’s face is radiant, clear of the blur of alcohol. She stands tall now as Kore, girl-goddess, still Eurydice’s protector though a hundred years have passed. Hades pretends his wife is on his arm, but he looks as if she is holding him up.

“I would like to make a wager,” Eurydice tells the God of Death. “If I win, Orpheus and I return up above, and my friends do not storm your palace.”

Hades raises his death-pale face. He looks as though Thanatos not only stands at his shoulder but holds his scythe to the god’s neck. “And if I win?” he asks.

“If I lose, I leave Hadestown and never return.” Eurydice has planned this moment for a century.

He nods and turns back to the open doors of the palace. “Come with me,” he says to Eurydice.

Before she follows, the third god of Hadestown runs to the stop of the steps and gestures that she is safe to the crowd below. With their cheers to her back, she enters the palace of death by the front door.

*****

This time, Hades leads Eurydice to the highest tower of the palace. Two guards drag open a gilt door at their approach, and Eurydice nods to them as she passes into the hall beyond.

Inside, the air is heady with incense. Thick carpets coat the floor, scattered with couches, game tables, and wine fountains. The whole room shimmers with heavy chandeliers and thick gold decorations on the walls. A mosaic on the vaulted ceiling depicts the halls of Olympus, with Hades marked in chips of amethyst. On the couches lounge the gods.

Nemesis and Eris lean over a strategy table, alternating sips from a goblet of ambrosia. Before a pool inlaid with crystal, Artemis and Dionysus wager on fate with each other. Poseidon and Athena bet against each other over a cock fighting ring, while Phoebe watches without interest. Mnemosyne, a pile of precious stones won to her side of the table, bets on dice rolls with Epimetheus.

Eurydice sees all of this as she scans the room, and her eyes light on the musician’s table at the far back corner. Apollo sits with a hand drum, keeping beat as Orpheus plays his laconic song. Feeling her eyes on him, Apollo looks across at Eurydice and smiles his heartbreaking smile at her. _Would you take me instead?_

Eurydice shakes her head. The music god shrugs and returns his attention to Orpheus’s song. It is his nature to ask, as much as it is his sister’s to hunt.

With a gesture, Hades clears his divine brothers from the jewelled game table at the centre of the room. Zeus and Poseidon step back and turn to watch Eurydice’s approach. She takes her seat and nods to them.

The chair is lined in velvet and inlaid with precious stones. The back is not as high as the chromium throne-chair Hades has installed himself in, but it draws the eye of every god in the room to Eurydice. Persephone takes the gilded chair on the third side of the table, rather than seating herself by her husband’s side. She is the arbiter of a game on this day, not a mystery.

Once more, a checkerboard sits before her. This time, the board is made of marble and obsidian, the checkers inlaid with diamonds. This time, Eurydice knows, the game will be fair. Her voice, backed by millions of souls, is loud enough that it must be.

Once more, Hades offers her the first throw. This time, the bones are carved from soapstone, a reassuring weight in Eurydice’s bandaged palm. When she calls, she feels Hermes and Dionysus look up from their games, the weight of their godly gaze upon her.

She throws Euripides. Perfect.

Across the table, Hades’ face is closed. His shoulders dip a fraction, his last hope for success gone. The gods have turned from him.

*****

When the game is finished, Hades stands and walks away from the table without a word. The game room is silent.

“Eurydice?”

Orpheus stands up from his place in the corner. His expression, blank for over a hundred years, is twisted in confusion. He picks at the hem of his fine shirt.

“You are a very foolish man,” Eurydice tells him. When he approaches, she takes the lute from his hands, lays it on the table, and throws herself into his arms.

"You came for me?" Orpheus whispers in her ear. "I was scared you would run away."

"It seemed like you needed a little bit of help." Eurydice gently knocks on the back of his head. "Don't break a promise to me again."

When Orpheus eventually puts her down, he notices her hands. “How long has it been?” he asks her. “I haven’t been myself.”

“Too long,” Persephone interrupts. “Come, I’ll bring you two with me up above. It’s time for a proper spring.” She grins at them.

“But first,” Eurydice hands the lyre back to Orpheus, “I believe there are people who should hear a real song from you, my love.”

She had bargained that the people of Hadestown would not overthrow Hades, not that they would continue work on his wall.


End file.
